The Quarter Sketch

Introducing - fully reused material sketchbooks!

Architects love a good sketchbook. A blank page to jot notes or doodle an idea. We often tote these little books around, even bosting them as our designer accessory - do you have a Moleskein or Rhodia? So we decided to reinvent this small accessory as the new virtue signal that is actually, virtuous?

This scrap paper book is 1/4 of a letter-sized sheet, or a 400g branch of pine (almost 1 lb).

Made of 100% reused materials, it saves 133g of paper and chipboard from the trash and prevents ~0.16 kg CO2e of manufacturing emissions.

Avoiding new paper production saves 2 gallons of water per pad.

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If 100 of these books were in circulation in place of virgin material pads, it would be as if one 40 foot tall pine was still standing in the forest.

Impact like this is easy to adopt, and done at scale can make meaningful change.

How they’re made:

It seems one-side printing has never gone out of style, and collecting hundreds of pages of copy paper with nothing on the back is relatively easy. Next, chipboard from mailers is collected as covers.

It takes about 15 minutes to cut, punch and trim 100 pages for a single notebook.

The covers are processed in the same method.

Page inserts are printed on paper older than anyone who is reading this blog. Cut and punched the same way.

When everything is stacked, the pages are easily thread onto a raw wire coil, and cut to size then crimped.

For the inaugural run of 20 books, a total of around 10 hours of labor was spent.